Python’s “batteries included” approach means that a lot of common tasks have high-level convenience functions for them. For example, if you want to read all the lines from a file into an array (list, in Python), you could do something like:
with open(filename) as f:
lines = f.readlines()
Easy peasy. Of course, because it’s so easy, there are other options.
For example, you can just convert the file directly to a list: lines = list(f). Or you can iterate across the file directly, e.g.:
with open(filename) as f:
for line in f:
# do stuff
Of course, that’s fine for plain old text files. But we frequently use text files which are structured in some fashion, like a CSV file. No worries, though, as Python has a csv library built in, which makes it easy to handle these files too; especially useful because “writing a CSV parser yourself” is one of those tasks that sounds easy until you hit the first edge case, and then you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake.
Now, it’s important to note that CSV usually is expressed as a “comma separated values” file, but the initialism is actually “character separated values”. And, as Sally‘s co-worker realized, newlines are characters, and thus every text file is technically a CSV file.
foo = list(csv.reader(someFile, delimiter="n"))
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